Vatican Backtracks on Synod Media Blackout, by Elise Ann Allen

ROME – Despite Pope Francis’s insistence on a media “fast” during this month’s Synod of Bishops, Vatican officials have said that engagement with the press is a personal decision, and participants who choose to give interviews will not be “punished”.

The clarification came after German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office and a figure seen as a critical of the synod, gave an Oct. 5 interview to EWTN.

Speaking to journalists during an Oct. 6 press briefing on the second day of the synod, Italian layman Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, told journalists that papal indications notwithstanding, “Every member of the synod makes their own discernment” in terms of whether to speak with the media. …

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